Brian Hutchinson: No reason to doubt Oppal committed to finding truth

Wally Oppal is the former B.C. Court of Appeal judge and politician now presiding over the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry, underway in a downtown Vancouver courtroom. He continues to be told how the process — to examine botched police investigations of serial killer Willie Pickton — is fatally flawed, that refusals by the provincial government to fund certain aboriginal and women’s groups have made their participation impossible.

Mr. Oppal has gone to bat for the disgruntled, only to be embarrassed by the B.C. government and snubbed by many of those invited to appear before him. Outside the inquiry room, on the street below, the disgruntled protest. They drum, sing and shout slogans: “Oppal Resign! Oppal Resign!”

The commissioner has been challenged inside the inquiry room, as well. On Wednesday, his mandate was criticized by the only aboriginal group to remain formally involved with the inquiry. “Too narrow,” complained Edward John, Grand Chief of the First Nations Summit, adding that “there are questions around credibility, there are questions around fairness.” He raised fears that Mr. Oppal’s report at the end of the inquiry will be “incomplete, unfair, perhaps irrelevant…. It will be another one of those inquiries that comes and goes. Nothing changes.”

Mr. Oppal was polite. He had heard it before. He thanked Chief John for his contribution, for his opening address, and encouraged him to return one day. “It doesn’t do anybody any good to withdraw from the inquiry,” Mr. Oppal said later.

The issues are too important. How, with police on his heels, could prime suspect Willie Pickton continue to kill women — some of them aboriginal, some of them addicts and sex-trade workers, all of them marginalized members of society — from Vancouver’s notorious Downtown Eastside? Appearing Wednesday for the Vancouver Police Department, lawyer Sean Hern acknowledged there had been “flawed” police investigations.

They were “nothing short of an epic failure,” added Mark Skwarok. He represents former VPD officer Kim Rossmo, an expert in criminal profiling who took an early interest in Vancouver’s missing women cases. In 1998, Dr. Rossmo was approached by residents of the Downtown Eastside; they expressed to him concerns that a serial killer might be in their midst, and responsible for the missing women. Dr. Rossmo took them seriously when few others did.

Dr. Rossmo drafted an August 1998 internal VPD memo with a proposed investigation plan. It was “largely ignored” by senior officers, Mr. Skwarok told the inquiry Wednesday. A 1998 press release that Dr. Rossmo helped prepare, alerting the community to the possibility of a serial killer, was never issued. A detailed, internal analysis that Dr. Rossmo wrote in May 1999, explaining why it was likely that “a single murderer was preying on skid row prostitutes” was “mostly ignored,” said Mr. Skwarok.

Dr. Rossmo left the VPD over a contract dispute in December 2000. He now teaches criminology at Texas State University. He will return to testify at the inquiry when called upon.

So will other former officers, some of whom are criticized in an internal VPD review prepared in 2005, more than three years after Pickton was finally arrested at his Port Coquitlam pig farm. The report was written by Deputy Chief Constable Doug LePard and was released to the public in 2010, after Pickton’s appeal on six murder convictions was denied by the Supreme Court of Canada.

The inquiry has heard of another Pickton review, this one prepared by the RCMP in 2002 to assist the force’s lawyers defend a civil action brought by the family of a woman whom Pickton killed. It was entered as an inquiry exhibit on Tuesday. Like the LePard report, it is a remarkable — and damning — document.

By 1998, Pickton was a “person of interest” to missing women investigators. The RCMP’s primary investigator and file coordinator at the time, “as a result of dealings with Pickton, felt strongly they were on to something,” the 2002 RCMP report reads. “However, continuous surveillance of Pickton showed that he was not doing anything of concern. There was nothing to substantiate or corroborate that he in fact was ‘hunting down women’ while he was under surveillance.” The surveillance was stopped.

In January 2000, two RCMP officers interviewed Pickton. The interview was unproductive but Pickton did consent to a search of his property. The two Mounties did not take up the offer. The RCMP report makes no mention of this. It does note that another RCMP officer decided to pay “more or less a social visit” to Pickton on his pig farm. Incredibly, the officer tipped his hand and “made it very clear” to Pickton that he was suspected of killing prostitutes. As well, he “relayed to Willie Pickton what [two police sources] allegedly disclosed about him killing people and doing all sorts of horrible things. He confronted Pickton who basically denied any wrongdoing.” And Pickton kept on killing. He was finally arrested in 2002.

“We’re very much committed to finding out what happened, when it happened and why it happened,” Mr. Oppal reiterated Wednesday.

The disgruntled won’t agree, but at this stage, there’s no great reason to doubt him.